Seeing that red Falcon made me want to find a picture of the one our family had, verify my memory of it, but no luck. I did find a color chart of blues that Ford used that included the color I remember: Viking Blue, which reminded me of The Viking Inn, an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord in Ardmore that my father took all eight of us to maybe once a year. Turkey, roast beef, ham, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, all piled high on platters that came around on a circular conveyor belt, then disappeared around the corner to be replenished. We could have as much as we wanted. The Viking Inn was heaven on Earth, and not because we ever had less than we needed. It was the choices! The whipped cream, the chocolate eclairs, the rolls, the butter, the gravy!

Those were wholesome days. Not perfect, just simpler. We were privileged and lucky. We played capture the flag in the street, rode our bikes everywhere, climbed trees, walked to school, called people on their landlines when no one else needed the phone, cared about the cost of long distance, and wrote thank you notes.

It makes me wonder how we might get back to a simpler, kinder time, without leaving anyone out.

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On my bike this morning, I saw a woman who looked like me up ahead. She was bent over taking a picture of something on the sidewalk that no one else could see. The only difference was the corgi attached to a rope around the woman’s waist. Knowing the woman was unaware of me, and worried that her dog might walk in from me, I slowed down. Truth is, I wanted to know what she was looking at. I’d found a stream of tiny ants near that spot once and I wondered if they were back.

When I said good morning, it startled her a bit. She apologized as we women so often do for nothing at all. I pet her dog while she told me she’d found a pill bug, a roly-poly, she called it. “My son is 19 now,” she said, “but he loved finding roly-polies when he was a kid. I thought I’d take a picture of it and text it to him.” It was a love message, pure and simple.

I told her how sweet that was, but as I rode off, I wished I’d told her what a great mom she is, how lucky her son is to have a mom like her.

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I keep looking at them, wondering why I like them so much. Curious if liking the darker one a little better tells me anything about myself.

The day I took these pictures, the sun was out, the sky was blue. A misty fog had settled on the beach maybe fifteen feet above the sand. My camera, a digital point-and-shoot, registered the fog in a way that my eyes did not. On that perfect summer day, my pictures captured something more like Armageddon, and yet, everyone’s relaxed, doing what people do on the beach: walk, take a picture, fly a kite.

It’s the boy with the kite I keep looking at. I love that the kite itself isn’t there. That my imagination fills it in. That unless you look closely you might not even see the string.

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He’s on the bed, a king mattress that we put on the floor so he could climb on and off without us worrying about a fall. It was both a sleeping place for the three of us, and Forrest’s playground. He’d pile up his stuffed animals and burrow into the middle of them, then peak out at me with the same big eyes as Elmo and Tinky Winky, urging me to find him. He loved to jump on the bed, alone, with me, or with a friend. In this picture, he’s standing on one foot mid-stride, stepping towards me. He’s naked except for a diaper. His chest and neck are marked with pink and purple lines, a map for radiation treatments. There are two scars: a line from the bottom of his chest to below the waist of his diaper left after a biopsy done at the very beginning. And two lines at 45-degree angles splaying out from there, remnants of the liver resection that might have saved his life. Together they form a ragged peace sign across his torso. His head is bald. He has no eyebrows or lashes. He’s a cancer kid.

And yet, he’s smiling.

This morning, I stopped to look at that picture again. Somehow, I find it comforting. Like he’s telling me it’s ok. Like he’s saying, carry on, Mommy.

I could stop there because I’m a little teary, but I want to tell you the rest.

Our digital scale is in my closet too. We’re giving it a rest for a while. Preferring not to look. Ever since we bought it, it’s lit up at random times without anyone standing on it. For a long time, I thought it was Forrest saying hi, but recently, I’d started explaining it away as static electricity or my footsteps turning it on.

This morning, I spent a few moments with that photograph and was lifted by it as usual. When I stepped away to pull on my jeans, I looked back at the closet and the scale lit up. Just blinked. And I knew. And I laughed out loud to let him know I’d heard him.

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I put my helmet on, stuffed my jeans in my socks, and took off. The first surprise was how chilly it was. Hot in the house, nippy outside. Should I go back for a sweater or let the pedaling warm me up? I kept going. A truck pulled out, didn’t see me, but I saw him, pulled wide and waved. He waved back. It might have been otherwise.

Half a block later, a giant blue garbage truck rounded the corner. As it came towards me, I smiled at the driver like I was his pal. He must have thought I was nuts. But I finished reading Simon Paré-Poupart’s memoir Trash: A Garbageman’s Story last night and wanted that driver to know I appreciate him. Paré-Poupart has been collecting garbage in Quebec for twenty years. He started collecting garbage to pay for college and ultimately earned a master’s degree in public administration. He still collects garbage because he loves the work and the people he works with. I hope that little bit of information will cause you to read his book, too.

Further down the road, I crossed the railroad tracks, headed towards the Willamette River, turned left to arrive at New Morning Café where I am now. The manager took my order (tea) and asked if had any plans for the day. I’m going to do some writing, I told him. What are you writing? he asked. I told him I wasn’t sure. Then I asked if he was a writer, and he said, nah, I can’t even read my own handwriting. He said if there’d been laptops when he went to college he might have wanted to write more. I was curious so I asked him what he’d studied. Sociology, he said. Then for unknown reasons that I’m grateful for, he told me that his favorite professor had worked with Howler Monkeys in the field before he started teaching. If we showed up, asked good questions, and did the work he expected us to do, he’d howl like those monkeys at the end of class. It made me wanna do my homework.

And that’s what happened.

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Early this morning, I took a walk on the beach, found myself staring up at the moon. It was just sitting there, suspended, motionless yet moving at gigantic speeds, held at a distance by a force I don’t understand, manipulating the ocean in front of me with its pull.

Yesterday, I watched two children building a sand pyramid on the edge of the surf. From here – a second-floor perch with a front row seat—the waves looked to be ready to swallow them whole. Such power and volume smashing down behind them. They played and re-built their pyramid over and over again. Their joy a reminder.

I had a purpose when I planned this trip. Brought a padded envelope stuffed with poems I’ve written, hoping to find enough good ones for a small book. I did, and I might. What ended up being most important was being quiet. I haven’t spoken to anyone in three days save a brief check-in with Brent on Saturday.

The beach. The ocean. It always works.

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But here I am now, ever-closer to the end of my life, with a long list of songs I’ve written that only live in recorded form. I’ve wanted to see them in print. Not all of them, just the ones I think someone else might like to play or sing someday. Seeing them on paper satisfies a need of mine to leave something tangible behind.

I started with “Lorelei,” a song I shared here a few months ago. Thankfully, my recording software doubles as transcribing software.

At the top of this screenshot, you’ll see the lead vocal I sang in the form of a sound wave. Below it, another window that represents what I sang being played on a keyboard. Each block represents the pitch I sang and its duration. If it extends over one beat on the grid, I’ll see a quarter note on the corresponding score; two beats and I’ll see a half note. The software simply translates the blocks into notes and rests.

My job is to make sure I played it correctly and edited those blocks in such a way that the software reads them correctly. That usually means simplifying or ignoring things like how I might sing ahead of the beat or behind it, or if I might naturally slow down or speed up at times. Decisions need to be made, and future players will have to interpret what’s on the page.

My teachers are Siri, Claude, and a human named Rob, whose YouTube tutorials are excellent but too dense for when I need a quick answer to a maddening lay-out problem. Let’s just say I’m learning how to converse with Claude and Siri, learning how to phrase specific questions, when to realize their answers are wrong. It’s a lot for this almost-sixty-eight-year-old brain, but I’m getting there.

Writing my songs out like this gives me a sense of completion. And I love the possibility that someone, somewhere, sometime in the future might find one of them and try to sing or play it. Maybe they’ll write additional verses, change the tempo or the key. Play it for a friend.

Press the arrow to hear “Lorelie”

It’s pretty much a thrill to see one of my songs this way. If you’re interested in giving “Lorelei” a try, let me know. Tell me what key you want to sing it in and I’ll send a file you can print.

And if you know my music and there’s a song you’d like to play, let me know. I’ll give it a shot. Here’s one called “Tree” from a CD called Parachute that I transcribed after “Lorelei.” Should have started here. A simple piano part is much easier for Siri and this beginner. In time, I’ll post more on my website.

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My eyes are drawn to the books that changed me: Richard Wright’s Native Son, for instance, because when I read it, my teen-aged self didn’t know yet how difficult it was to be black in America. I still think it should be required reading. Then there’s Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud, because of the first stanza of her poem “From the Book of Time”. She describes stepping outside, seeing a thrush, hearing it sing, and wondering, maybe just looking and listening/is the real work. /Maybe the world without us, /is the real poem. And every time I read those lines, I think, Yes! Exactly!

Then my eyes move to Brenda Ueland’s classic, If You Want to Write. Yes, I do! Brenda gave me permission to forget how my high school English teacher felt about my writing; what she said when she read a piece of mine to the class as an example of bad writing. Brenda encouraged me to write how I write, not how my teachers taught me to write. Her book meant freedom to me and the beginning of lifelong healing.

There are two copies of Hesse’s Siddhartha, one of The Courage to Create (Rollo May), The Tao of Pooh (Benjamin Hoff), The Book (Alan Watts), and Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton), all books that I’ll probably never read again but which still send me messages.

But there at the bottom is a half-shelf full of old journals. I wonder if Brent’s son will see them. I don’t want him or anyone else to read them, ever, not because I have anything to hide but because they’re boring, which is the worst thing you can say about someone’s writing. What’s in there is me trying to figure out my mind, my heart, situations I found myself in. I ask myself this morning, should I pitch them now? But then I hesitate, thinking surely there’s some treasure in there, something only I would discover if I opened them up again.

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Yesterday was my first time. My friend Jay gave me a ticket. He’s been involved in the fair for over thirty years, was head of the Ambient Art Crew for most of that time. Now he’s got emeritus status and the best campsite. To get to it, you pass through corridors created with tapestries winding through old trees thick with understory. I got to the fair at 7:30 in the morning, two-and-a-half hours before the other 10,000 or so arrived by car, bus, scooter, or horse, every single one dressed for merry-making.

Country Fair owns the land it sits on west of Eugene. 500 acres along the Long Tom River. For one weekend a year it comes alive with creativity and imagination. It’s a giant network of crisscrossing wooded paths, gnarly treehouses, booths filled with crafts to buy and food to eat, hobbit-like retreats with polka dot pillows and velvety furniture when you need to rest, all worn and comfy. There’s live music everywhere, mostly ambient, small gatherings of people playing guitar, singing with strangers, unrehearsed, with maybe a Celtic harp, a clarinet or a marimba. It’s an enormous operation with an underlying feel of possibility and kindness. 30,000 people will have shown up this past weekend, along with 20,000 volunteers doing all manner of big and small jobs. It’s a joyful, open-hearted gathering, and boy, did I need that. Don’t we all.

Parades like this one travel through the crowd regularly throughout the day…Worth watching if you want to smile:

And Mary the Librarian being delivered early in the day…

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Thank you! Your support helps me to keep going.

Acknowledging grief, at least for me, lifts a substantial portion of the weight. A friend suggested I call the local hospice. They offer support not only for those who are dying but for those who are grieving the loss of someone. The therapist I spoke with listened to my hurting heart for a good twenty minutes before she said, “I’m glad you called.” We set up an appointment for a couple of weeks from now, her first available date falling on my mom’s birthday. I like coincidences like that. They feel like votes of encouragement from the universe.

Two days later, my niece, her husband and two daughters arrived tired and animated after five days rafting on the Rogue River south of Corvallis. We set up borrowed air mattresses for the girls. One in my studio where the piano lives, one in the room where my scissors and glue sticks are, both small rooms with just enough space for a made-up bed on the floor. My niece and her husband slept in our guest room, did laundry and hung wet clothes to dry all over the place. We picked blueberries, did Mad Libs, drew pictures, watched soccer, ate pizza, read books, slept, talked, and laughed for two days straight. Just before they got in their car to leave for the airport, we pulled ourselves together for a tight-fitting hug, and said how much fun we’d had. It was exactly what I needed; exactly what makes me happy.

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This flower was growing in Brent’s garden. Siri tells me she’s Rose Campion. That’s what I love about Siri: she knows a lot more than I do, and she retains it.

My favorite thing about this photo is the pollen. There’s a lot of it, and that gives me hope. I like that critter hiding in the petals too. Didn’t see him until I zoomed in.

Chives. Thank you, Siri:

And this is Harry. He bloomed for the first time on the day my friend Kirsti’s beloved cat Harry died, so I named him Harry too. This Harry is dormant now, a volunteer who found his way to a spot under the Camper Down tree we planted for our Wally. Wally’s full name was Wallister Pee McWally, Royal Dog. When we lived in Colorado, he would howl like a wolf when the automated church bells down the street chimed “Amazing Grace” at noon on Wednesdays. All this comes back to me with this photo.

This is one of maybe a dozen roses that bloom on the west side of our house every spring. Brent brings them in as they bloom so we can spend more time admiring them. The vase reminds me of my mom. She was a scientist and this is a beaker. I bought it for a dollar at the Oregon State University Used store. If she were here, I’d send her one for her flowers. She’d like it. The surface is our new induction stove. I’m getting used to it, but don’t worry. I was attempting artfulness here, not cooking the rose.

And our kitchen sink.

That’s Myrtle (the orchid) on the left. She’s had her daily steam bath coming off the tea I poured purposefully just below her. Next to her, roses in various stages of decay (or life, depending on how you look at it).

Finally, this:

It’s my right eyeball taken last week. Those retinal arteries carry everything I see to my optic nerve and on to my brain to visualize. Incredible. And maybe that’s the thread.

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I’ve only flipped thru them. Some of the pages are copies of handwritten essays, most are copies of typed, finished essays. There’s a table of contents in each volume, so they’re organized despite different formats. I know I’ll read them some day. I’m just not there yet.

I’m like my father in a lot of ways. He was a dreamer, an innocent, a person who read and wrote and thought and talked and needed people to listen.

Until a few months ago, I was in a weekly poetry group for over five years, wrote a poem or two a week. That’s at least 250 poems. There are a handful of good ones, but most need work or abandonment. I want to put the good ones together into a small book. I tell myself it’s because I want to give a copy to my friends. But the deeper truth is that I want there to be a bound collection. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to imagine its future – how it may find its way to a second-hand bookstore, or one of those free libraries outside a home in San Antonio or Oklahoma City, where a curious reader might pick it up, read a poem or two and be moved somehow. In that way, my words will live on, and I will, too.

Some of you may be interested in the kind of thing my father would write. Here’s the opening two paragraphs of his book, One Good Idea, written around 1999:

At 25 I could not have conceived of writing such a book as this. At 50, I hoped that someone else would do it. At 75 I saw a real need for it, because many of my fellow citizens are experiencing Globalism. As Americans, they have an instinctive grasp of the principles which have governed this nation, but explanations of the current world order have been scarce. Possibly this lack exists because leading American political and business figures have been so consumed with pressing domestic problems that they have neglected the education of the public regarding rapid changes in international arrangements. 	

Like many of us I have looked for an ideal policy or noble leader to secure our relations with other nations. Finally, I acknowledged that there was a shortage of both. Instead of discouraging me, that conclusion induces me to look ahead and identify the main trends of global life, from the perspective of one who thinks the world is understandable. Even to state such a goal is presumptuous because the world is so complex and diverse. However, ordinary citizens are called to understand and support the fascinating job of dealing with the complexities of a world which is, in its maturity, facing a bright future. Others will stand up to do the work. I offer some insights which have come my way. 

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Five minutes later, the beach was mostly empty. I walked for miles and forgot about humanity for a while. I felt the wind again, the sun on my face, the rhythm and power of the ocean coming and going, and it occurred to me that the reason I’d kept the stone was its roundness, the smoothness that’s come from thousands of years of being tossed around.

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Before I left her, I told the woman whose name I didn’t know, that I’d go get my car and give her a ride home if she was still there when I got back. She was, so I put her walker in the hatch, got her settled in and off we went. She was talkative, animated, clear with her directions, got us right to her front door – a tiny pastel apartment amongst other tiny pastel apartments. As she was turning towards her door, grateful to be home, I gave her my phone number. Told her to call me if she ever needed a ride. As I drove away, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. What if she did call me? What if she got in the habit of calling me? What if she needed more than a ride someday?

Then on Thursday, my phone rang. “Hi Bar,” she said. “It’s Marie,” as though we were old friends. “I missed the bus. Could you give me a ride? I’m late for my iPad class.” At that moment, I was re-finishing our kitchen cabinets. I had polyurethane on my hands. “Sure,” I said. “Give me five or ten minutes.” It was the last thing I wanted to do. But how do you say no when you can give someone a ride when they need one?

Often when I sit down to write, I’m not sure what will come of it. I start and somehow get to the end. This ending poked me. I found myself wishing that as a country we would ask questions like this one more often. Every day.

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You might have already seen an email from me about finishing “Lorelei”, a song I shared early last year in demo form. It’s taken awhile but it’s finally done. Attached is a downloadable version. Thank you for your generous and much appreciated support.

After you’ve listened to the song, you might google the name Lorelei. When I w…

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Lorelei

When the moon shines on the river 
and the sun has left the sky
After boats are tied to moorings with a sigh
I can hear the water lappin’ 
on the shoreline keepin’ time
and say a prayer that another day is done  

Lorelei, oh, Lorelei
I hear your voice when you sing at night
Then say a prayer for another day to come

Then the sun comes through the window
and the crow’s back in the yard
the bed is made for leavin’ by and by
I listen for the quiet of sails caught by the wind 
and say a prayer that another day’s begun

Lorelei, oh, Lorelei
I hear your voice when you sing at night 
Then say a prayer for another day to come

Now the snow lays on the mountain 
the cold is dark and hard
but the river waits below for melt to flow
I hear your voice, it’s singin’
with the Blackbirds’ on-ke-lee 
and say a prayer for another day to come

Oh, Lorelei, my, Lorelei
I hear your voice when you sing at night
Then say a prayer for another day to come

I say a prayer that another day will come


©2026, Bar Scott

iTunes and Spotify etc will distribute “Lorelei” in the next few weeks. I should have waited to share it with you, but sometimes it’s hard to wait. Paid subscribers, you’ll get another email with a downloadable version of the song. Free subscribers can buy a downloadable version of any of my songs (including this one) on my website: barscott.com. Thank you in advance.

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Have a good week everybody. Love, Bar

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Sometimes when I walk into the room where the Aura frame is, my mom will be looking at me. I’ll say, hi Momma, then carry on with whatever I’m doing. Other times, I say, hi Momma, stop to look at her for a beat or two, then tell her I’m not sure if I miss her or not. That must sound terrible, but I feel like she understands, and it’s true. I’ve lived on the other side of the country for so long that I’m used to her not being close by. It’s the same with my dad.

Before they died, I wondered how I’d respond when they did. Would I be shattered? Would I feel relief that whatever suffering or demise they might face was behind them? Behind me. Would I be grateful that I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about how they might die. I would know. We were lucky. Neither suffered too terribly or for over-long.

When I sat down to write this morning, a half-page of scrap paper I’d written on months ago slipped out of my notebook. I’d forgotten about it and it made me laugh. The first sentence is a massive understatement, but I remember realizing that if I wrote about my mom with a little snarkiness, I could write more honestly, less sentimentally; that I could capture a fuller picture of who she was and who I became because of her. Let’s put it this way, my snarkiness was something she knew a lot about. Reading this paragraph brought her back to me in full color. Made me want to write some more. Get to know her better. Capture more of her for myself:

My mother was not a dingbat. She’s dead now, so I’m not saying she was not a dingbat to saint-ify her. God knows she’s endured enough of that already. She wasn’t perfect, but her imperfections did not include dingbat-ism if you want to call being a dingbat an imperfection. She was just very smart. Nothing got past her. She had two of those proverbial eyes in the back of her head, not in a weird way but in a motherly way, as though she could read your mind and cared enough to read it thoroughly.

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Soon after I finished writing the book, I got a call from a literary agent who loved it, wanted to pitch it to all the big publishers. I wept when I got her message. It was as if my deepest, most tightly held dreams were coming true. I was a writer! A legit writer! A writer worthy of another person’s time and energy. In the end, the agent wasn’t able to sell it, so I published it myself.

Then last Thursday, I got an email from a man named Ethan, the editorial director of one of the more distinguished publishing houses the agent had pitched my book to. He had just read it. Told me it was a powerful story, one that deserved more attention. Asked if I would consider working with him to bring it to a wider audience.

His enthusiasm went right to my heart. Forrest would come back to life. More people would have an opportunity to meet him. I could live with him again. Talk about him. Assure potential readers that my book was a love story not a worst-nightmare story. I told Ethan all of that. He wrote me back. Agreed. Said he felt the same way, that I’d communicated that love in a beautiful way; that the world needed more of this kind of beauty.

I agreed!

I agreed so completely that I sent him the manuscript. Told him what I thought could be improved, what I didn’t want to change, how I could write an epilogue that described how my beliefs about life after death have evolved, how I’ve survived. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

But Fake-Ethan had caught me. He was fishing and I’d been hooked. He was somebody somewhere who had access to my personal email and enough know-how to connect my book with that address. The catch, had he reeled me all the way in, was for me to hire the editor he recommended. Pay that editor up front, then disappear.

My husband Brent is surprised that I’m not angry. I’m not. I’m embarrassed, but also grateful, because Fake-Ethan reminded me how dear and real my dreams still are.

Abigail Thomas painted the cover of The Present Giver. I love the tree in black and all the color growing from it. It feels like what happened to me while Forrest was here and afterwards. If you click on the book, it’ll take you to Amazon where you’ll find a soft cover and an audible version that includes some of my music and an intro recorded by my father. One of the downsides to self publishing is that sales are almost impossible anywhere but Amazon.

But you might try your local book store first.

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This morning, we took the TV to the recycling center hoping to find a bin for dead TVs. There was one, so we left it there. I wondered if maybe someone with better skills could salvage the thing. We taped the remote and the power cable neatly to the back just in case.

At Costco 20 minutes later, we bought a 50-inch replacement for 350 bucks. The bigger miracle is that we didn’t buy anything else. On the way home, we stopped for a bowl of soup, both of us knowing it would take more energy than we had at that point to figure out how to work the TV.

Turned out it wasn’t that hard. Learning to use the slicker, quicker new remote was harder. Where the hell is the mute button? It’s there, but the icon identifying it is the size of a pin head. I finally quit when Brent wanted to watch a PBS documentary that required us to be Passport members, which we are, but accessing it meant one more password to type in. I had to get away. I found myself longing for the old days when you turned on your TV and watched Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night and the whole family gathered around.

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